City of Lost Dreams

THIRTY

Sarah was looking at the Golden Fleece. She had gotten used to seeing the emblem on every third painting or façade in Vienna. And here it was, bouncing off a man’s chest right in front of her. Sarah peered at the limp golden lamb emblem hanging from a chain against the black doublet, then peered into the man’s face. This was undoubtedly Ferdinand.

She recognized the close-cropped reddish hair and beard. And the Hapsburg chin. Holy shit, they weren’t kidding about the chin. The man’s whole visage was exaggeratedly carved, almost cartoonlike with its large eyes, dented forehead, and hooked nose. And yet, there was something appealing about him, too, something powerful. He was playing a small flute: the Doppel-unuchenflöten, basically an early form of the kazoo. Now she could see that Ferdinand was surrounded by a group of courtiers, who were all playing similar instruments. They were giggling and laughing as they did, deliberately making their instruments honk and squeak and . . . yeah, they were making fart noises.

Sarah felt a flush of rage. She had saved this last bit of the drug, hoarded it, when it really belonged to Nico. She had not taken it when she was in Heiligenstadt, where she could have seen Beethoven at one of the most critical moments in his career. Not taken it back to Boston, where she could have seen her own father, lost to her for so many years. She had saved it for when she thought it would help Pols, but all she was getting was asinine men making flatulence jokes?

Her heartbeat was accelerating. The outlines of other people, other times, were beginning to form all around her in the hallway. A girl, hugely pregnant, buckled to her knees in front of Sarah. The girl’s hair was covered in a scarf, and her long, heavy dress was blue and rust colored. No, not rust colored. That was blood, soaking through the girl’s skirt as she began to gasp and scream in hoarse, high-pitched shrieks. She saw a man and a woman, dressed in rich brocade and silks, though the man’s breeches were open, and the woman’s sumptuous gown was shoved up around her hips, a stockinged leg waving in the air, a silk shoe dangling half off as she squirmed underneath him. The man had one hand firmly clamped over her mouth. To stifle her cries of ecstasy? Cries of panic? It was so vivid, too vivid. Sarah could smell their sex. The rhythmic thumping and sliding and gnashing of their bodies and choked groans and cries were thunderous. Sarah clung to the wall, forcing herself to stand. Men in military uniforms now surrounded her on all sides. She remembered Gottfried telling her that the Schloss had been used at one point as a military barracks. These men were struggling to hold someone down, urging him to be calm, to be brave. They were shouting, half laughing, very drunk. Bloody. “I will have to take the leg,” someone said. “Or he will die.” Sarah saw a man, jacket off, sleeves rolled up, shirt stained in bile and blood, lifting a saw. The patient began to shriek. And the sounds coming from his mouth were remarkably similar to those of the bleeding pregnant woman and the copulating woman in brocade and silk. And the sound of the saw cutting through bone was like the sound of Ferdinand’s flute, which was also like the sound of the copulating man. They had formed a chorus, through time.

This was history. Fear, pain, pleasure, music. Sex and death. The big death. The little death. This was what it looked like. What it sounded like.

There had to be music here, real music. She needed to be calm. Sarah shut her eyes and covered her nose in order to listen better.

At first all she could hear were the same macabre layers of shrieking and groaning, but eventually she found it. A light, twanging sound. A lute. A lute being plucked, not quite tunefully. Sarah began to grope toward it, feeling her way against the actual walls with her eyes tightly screwed shut so as not to be distracted by the bodies hurling themselves in her path. She was stumbling, blindly, into fields of energy, which seared her nerves and made her dizzy with confusion. She ran straight into a suit of armor that felt very much like it existed in the present day and Sarah found herself doing an absurd polka with the armor, crashing down the hall, trying to disentangle herself. At last she reached a set of stairs and she stumbled up them as her knightly dance partner clattered to the floor, chivalry thwarted, if not absolutely dead.

The sound of the lute was louder now, as she wove around passing phantoms crackling with emotion: lust, fear, lust, fear. And then, quite suddenly, a burst of pure joy. Sarah stared down at a thin adolescent boy, who was in turn staring at a single beam of sunlight coming from a narrow casement window above them. He held his hand out in front of him, caressing the light with his slight fingers as if he were stroking a cat. He was dressed in the formal court dress of the mid-eighteenth century, his fine hair caught back with a ribbon, his thin cheeks marked lightly with what looked like smallpox scars. His hand paused in the air, he smiled with deep satisfaction, then turned and ran down the stairs, out of Sarah’s sight. Her heart was racing.

Mozart.

She was pretty sure she had just seen Mozart. Age thirteen or so, probably on the way to or from one of the family trips to Italy. He was about the same age as Pollina was now. Pollina would never see her own hand held in front of her face, but Sarah had seen the girl, in a Boston apartment crowded with dusty antique furniture, step into a shaft of sunlight from one of the deep bay windows. And Pols had felt the sun on her face and she smiled with the same kind of secret joy. Held her own thin hand up in front of her face, conducting the music in her head. This, too, was history. Not just lust and fear, but exaltation. Creation. Genius. Pols had the flame of genius within her. A flame as deep and dazzling and mysterious as the one that burned in the young man who had just walked past Sarah on the stair, two hundred and fifty years or one second earlier. There was something here that would help Pollina. There had to be. She had to find it. What was her own life, her own contrail of energy? Was this not her gift? She was being given now, in this moment, a chance to use those perceptions within her that had been strengthened. She could call forth from the melee the individual voices she needed to hear. Like a conductor, as Pols had said.

Sarah let the last of her resistance to the drug fall away from her. She closed her eyes, breathed deeply, and stretched out her mind, feeling it unravel from the center of her forehead like spools of unfurling ribbons.

The galleon. What was the powder that Philippine had put in the galleon?

“Gently,” said a voice, just above her. Sarah opened her eyes. A man stood on the stair, dressed in black with sleeves slashed with red satin. Not Ferdinand, though bearing a slight resemblance to him. One of his sons? The outlines of his figure were hazy, fading into the air. A second man, dressed somewhat more simply though still elegantly, shifted something large and gleaming in his hands.

The Spanish galleon. Sharp and solid and gold.

Good, she thought. I can focus.

Sarah followed the two men up the stairs and into a large, high-ceilinged room lined with books and cabinets containing corals and other minerals. Globes and astrolabes stood on small tables. Maps covered a long refectory table. A fire burned at one end of the room, which was otherwise lit by candles. Sarah watched as the man carrying the galleon set it gently upon the long table, then, with a deferential murmur, withdrew.

“I am sorry but I cannot help you.” The man in black and red turned to a figure by the window Sarah hadn’t noticed before. A slim young woman, wearing a heavy black coat with a furred hood. There was something about her, something familiar. The young woman moved gracefully, swaying slightly, toward the table.

“I was told that the emperor gave it to you.” The woman’s voice, too, was soft, though Sarah could feel an undertone of acidity.

“I am sorry, Lady Elizabeth.”

“Do you mock me?” the woman replied with a small smile, softening her voice. “By calling me this?”

“Surely you are used to hearing your name coupled with titles? You are the tenth Muse, Westonia, the Virgo Angla. Perhaps I do you a dishonor to call you less.”

Sarah watched Elizabeth Jane Weston receive these tributes with a melancholy flutter of her hand. What was Elizabeth Weston’s connection to the galleon?

“I am a daughter, above all else,” she said. “A daughter who must beg for the things that were stolen from her father’s house in the dead of night by your emperor’s men.”

“Your emperor, too.”

“Oh, we all bow before Caesar.” Elizabeth curled her lip. “Please. May I look at it?” Sarah moved forward to see better and stumbled over something hard, at her knees. Something that hadn’t existed in whatever time she had been following, but most definitely did in the twenty-first century. Sarah pitched face forward onto the floor. Something had cut into her knee and the smell of her own blood momentarily overwhelmed her. When she looked up, Elizabeth Weston and the man had vanished.

A crowd of figures appeared, jostling her, running past her, through her. Smothering her with their emotions, their desires, their fears and dreams. Everything twisted, twisted. Like chains.

She needed to move back further in time. Elizabeth Weston and Edward Kelley came after Philippine’s era. She needed to focus. Music. Where was the music? Sarah fought through the layers until she found the gentle sounds of the lute again. She tried to tie her mind to the sound of the music. Water. Splashing water. Laughter. She groped up another flight of stairs, down a short hallway, and into a wood-paneled room decorated with a frieze of bathing scenes. In the middle of the floor sat a child, idly plucking at a lute.

Not a child. A dwarf. Not Nico. This was a woman, red faced and sleepy eyed. At one end of the room, Sarah could hear voices coming from behind a small door. The little woman plucked a string and then the instrument fell lax in her hands. Her head fell forward. She snored. Sarah opened the door.

She was in a bathroom. A literal bath room, with a large, rectangular tub lined with tin-plated copper sheeting taking up most of the floor. The entire room was painted with murals of sea creatures: fish of all kinds, crabs, frogs, toads, and snakes. Incense burned from two large copper pots.

A middle-aged man and woman sat across from each other, on painted benches in the water. The man was naked except for a pair of brief swimming trunks. The woman wore a backless, apronlike garment. They both wore caps on their heads. The man reached over and fiddled with a tap decorated with a lion’s head. Water gushed out. Ferdinand. And . . . was this Philippine? Their faces were serene, blissful.

Sarah realized that these people were definitely on some kind of drug themselves. She could feel it wafting off their bodies. It was different from Westonia, gentler. Kinder.

Sarah decided to join them in the tub, curious if she would actually be able to feel the water. Yes, and it was hot and scented. Every part of her body felt soothed.

“You must hide the book,” said the woman.

Hide it? Sarah thought. Why hide a book of cures? Particularly if they contained a recipe for what had to be the best bath salts ever.

“I will hide it,” agreed Ferdinand.

“Bury it. Not here.”

“I am designing a mausoleum for it,” Ferdinand said softly. “A mausoleum disguised as a star. A star disguised as a palace.”

“Good. No one knows?”

“Secrets are hard to keep in this world.”

“And in the next, perhaps.”

“Philippine.” Ferdinand smiled and stretched himself sensuously. “This is wonderful. What a feeling. Tell me you are not tempted to experiment further with the secrets of this book?”

“I am content to cure the sicknesses that come to all of us. The headache, the sore, the wound, the pains of childbirth, the fever, the spirit that is perturbed. The secrets in your book are powerful and wild. I cannot be responsible for what they unleash,” Philippine replied. “We must not go deeper than this. That is why you must bury the book deep enough that others will not be tempted. These things are not for us to know.”

They weren’t talking about Philippine’s recipe book. They were talking about the Fleece.

They had the Fleece. Philippine was rising from the bath.

“Where are you going?” asked Ferdinand.

“There’s a stable boy with Saint Anthony’s fire. The poor lad is in agony.”

“He can wait. Come back.”

Philippine was wrapping herself in a robe, donning her slippers. Sarah had to follow her. Sarah must see, she must learn. Philippine was leaving the room. Sarah ran after her, and then straight into Gottfried von Hohenlohe.

Straight into him, and with a lurch that sent a thousand jolts through her skin, straight through him.